Her father did not graduate from high school, and though her mother attended Hunter College for two years, she did not earn a degree.

When Hunt was 9 years old, her mother gifted her a chemistry set for Christmas, which sparked her early interest in science.

In 1998 she was an instructor at a summer workshop for women entering Ph.D. programs in mathematics run by the EDGE Foundation (Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education).

[8] She has been a member of the Bryn Mawr College board of trustees since 1992 and the Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee for the United States Department of Energy since 1994.

[9] The Association for Women in Mathematics has included her in the 2020 class of AWM Fellows for "her exceptional commitment to outreach and mentoring; for her sustained efforts to make the AWM organization more inclusive; for her service to higher education and government; and for inspiring those underrepresented in mathematics with her work in ergodic theory, probability, and computation".